Chapter 2 - Visions of the Past
While the ambulance truck drove to the veterinary clinic where they were taking Barbara and Vinny, the Griffins' station wagon followed. The puppies held each other as they cried, while, right now, Meg and Chris held them.
"What's going to happen to us?" Jenny began, "if Mom dies?"
"Don't think about that," Lois replied as Peter drove. "However, what we're really worried about is Vinny."
"Why do you need to worry about that son of a bitch instead of our mom?" Briana crossed her arms.
"First of all, you shouldn't use that kind of language," Lois replied. "Second, we don't want to lose Vinny like we've lost your father."
The puppies looked down scared, trying to keep their hopes up. They couldn't lose their mother soon after losing their father. All four of them closed their eyes, praying as hard as they could in silence.
"Please, don't leave us, Mom," Jenny prayed. "We love you, and still need you. Please, don't leave us."
Little did they know how their mother took a turn for the worst. Barbara didn't mourn as much as she did in the beginning, nor did she cry 24/7. Sure, she felt sad and lonely off and on, but she didn't cry. She took her pain out on eating. All the junk food she ate led to her heart attack.
As the crew took both dogs' stretchers out of the ambulance truck, Barbara, still in her heart-attack-induced coma, had a vision...
She wandered around in a field after reading a road sign, that she was in Austin, Texas.
"What's going on?" she thought to herself. "One minute, I'm fighting a dog I hated with a passion, and the next, I feel pain and wind up in Austin. But why?"
The silence was broken when she heard two young boys' voices giggling. She followed the sound and saw two young puppies playing with each other. They looked exactly like how Brian and Vinny would look like if they were puppies.
"Boy, Vinny," the puppy resembling Brian addressed in a voice that sounded like Mokuba Kaiba. "It sure is nice getting to know you, and to play with you."
"You said it, Brian," Puppy Vinny addressed in a voice that sounded like Young Sanji (or how Ash Ketchum sounded if he were born in Brooklyn). "I wasn't sure about straying away from the mill so much, but I gotta tell ya', this is pretty fun."
"I don't believe it," Barbara thought, surprised. "Brian knew Vinny when they were just puppies?"
"So," Puppy Vinny continued, "anything else you wanna play, big brother?"
"Big brother?!" Barbara repeated in thought, shocked. It was when she realized in horror. "Oh, my God. The one dog who replaced Brian, and who I've hated with a passion...is my brother-in-law? Oh, no. If I ever get out of here, what the hell am I going to tell the puppies, and the rest of the Griffins?"
Then, just as both puppies began to frolic in the field, jumping to catch butterflies, the vision faded. Soon after that, Barbara was pinned down. She looked up and saw a white Pit Bull twice her size looming over her, keeping her down.
"A..." she struggled. "Arnie?"
"So, you finally found out the hard way, didn't you, dollface?" Arnie addressed her in a voice that sounded like Ichigo Kurosaki. "You finally learned that the one dog you've hated with a passion was your late husband's younger brother."
"I'm sorry," Barbara wept. "I...I didn't even know."
"Sure, you didn't," Arnie replied. "And because you've fought him so hard using what you've learned in the organization, he's going to join his brother in death. And if he dies, your puppies are going to be so angry at you for killing their uncle."
"No," Barbara sobbed. "I...I didn't want something like this to happen! Please, spare me, Arnie!"
Arnie was just about to punch her in the face when...
"Clear!"
Barbara awoke when her body jumped as the doctor shocked her. Her heart has just been restarted. She saw wires on her chest, hooked to the heart monitor. She had just been saved through CPR.
She gasped in relief. "I've been given another chance at life," she whispered.
"You're lucky to be alive, ma'am," the doctor said. "We were able to pump out the junk food inside of you that caused you to go into a heart attack."
"H... Heart attack?" she repeated.
"Yes," the doctor replied. "Not long after, we suggested your family to come in from the waiting room."
Said family members stood in front of the door, and all but one were relieved to see Barbara get saved. The only exception was a very angry Marcus.
"Oh, Barbara," Lois shed tears of joy. "Thank God you're all right."
"For a second there," Peter added, "we thought we were going to lose you like we've recently lost Brian."
"You should be ashamed of yourself, Mom!" Marcus shouted, pointing a finger at her.
Barbara and the rest took this with rather-peculiar looks.
"You thought about nobody but yourself when you ate all that goddamn junkfood, and took your anger out on Mr. Vinny, and it's because of that fight you had with him that you wound up with that damn heart attack!"
"Marcus," Lois lowered her eyes. "That's no way to talk in front of your mother."
Barbara quickly remembered something.
"Vinny," she said.
Barbara got off of the stretcher, prompting the wires to pop off of her chest.
"Mrs. Griffin, wait!" the doctor called.
Barbara ran out of her room and into Vinny's, and as soon as she got in, she gasped, sad and horrified, her hands clasped over her snout. She saw a sight that she couldn't believe, and heard a sound she didn't expect-a flatline beep from the heart monitor. Vinny...was dead.
Author's note: If I had to choose a voice for the puppy versions of Brian and Vinny, it would respectively be Tara Jayne Sands and Veronica Taylor. Tara played Mokuba Kaiba in the 4Kids dub of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, while Veronica played Ask Ketchum in the 4Kids dub of Pokémon, up to the fourth season of the Advanced Generation arc (or Pokémon The Series: Ruby Sapphire as it's currently called), and Young Sanji in the 4Kids dub of One Piece.
